Sciency Fiction

I’ve been thinking about science in fiction recently. Prompted by Jennifer Rohn’s recent piece in Nature, I checked out her excellent LabLit site. Cath Ennis has also been blogging here about books, but most enticingly I have a stack of novels ready for my holiday next month. Time, then, for a personal selection of some science-themed fiction I’ve enjoyed in the last ten or so years… Although I was a science fiction nut as a boy, and still enjoy the odd foray into epic space operas – Iain M. Banks, principally – most of what I read these days comes of the general fiction shelves. And I’ll be honest, often I read fiction to escape from the day job, so I’m not really a massive consumer of LabLit. In fact, interpreting the genre (overly) literally, I can think of only two books I’ve read that actually feature a laboratory – Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and Atomised by Michel Houellebecq.

These two novels demonstrate nicely though that even when science and scientific ideas are important in a book, it is their qualities as works of fiction that are most important to me. Chief among these are character and style (possibly one of the reasons I didn’t get on with Ian McEwan’s Saturday was my intense dislike of the charmless Henry Perowne – although neither Michel nor Bruno in Atomised are exactly sympathetic and I loved that…) I’m less fussed about plot. Indeed some of my favourite books, by the likes of David Mitchell, Haruki Murukami, or Geoff Dyer, either leave large chunks of plot unresolved, or (in the case of Dyer especially) simply have little of much consequence happen in them.

I perhaps don’t tend to go for classic LabLit then, but I do like a book with a scientific sensibility, ‘sciency fiction’, if you will. Specifically, as an ecologist I like to read good authors writing about the natural world. Sometimes this is overtly scientific – Hope Clearwater, protagonist in William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach, is a professional ecologist, and distilled through Boyd’s literary eye, her descriptions of field work in Dorset and Africa are especially vivid.

More often though, the science is more subtle. I loved Being Dead by Jim Crace, for example: the story of an elderly couple, murdered amid remote sand dunes, and slowly decomposing, it sounds horribly morbid but the tiny ecological details make it strangely beautiful. Given that I’m writing as Mola mola, I should probably mention Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flannagan too, although the focus is less on fish biology than on the grotesque deprivations of life in the penal colonies of Tasmania. There’s a nice fishy theme in Luis Fernando Verissimo’s wonderful The Club of Angels too, specifically the joys of eating the deadly fugu – more gastronomy than science, but a diversion well worth taking!

I’m a sucker for geekiness, and I like authors who assume of their readers a certain facility with numbers. Many writers think nothing of inserting, untranslated, phrases in Latin or Greek, German or Spanish. Why not then credit readers with knowledge of calculus or t-tests? So, while some may think it indulgent, I was rather charmed by the pages of pi reproduced in Douglas Coupland’s JPod, and the mathematical ‘calcae’ (appendices) at the end of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Neal Stephenson is an interesting case, the only author above who remains confined to the Science Fiction and Fantasy shelves in my local bookshop – a barrier sufficient to deter many potential readers. I maintain however that his sprawling Baroque Cycle is as effective an evocation of time and place (17th and early 18th Century Europe and beyond) as any I’ve read, encompassing wars and disease as well as the foundations of modern economics and natural scientific enquiry – in short, it is a work of historical fiction, albeit one with a scientific bent. I’m not claiming his works are worthy of the major literary prizes (indeed I’ve often felt that some of his tomes might benefit from losing a hundred pages here and there), but it has become something of a mission for me to convince those friends and family who loved, for instance, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall that they would find something to enjoy in Stephenson’s epic. That my missionary zeal has yet to catch on only makes me more determined!

Making Impact Plans make more impact

I’m in the midst of putting together a grant application at the moment, to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Part of this involves a document describing the activities I plan to undertake in order to fully realise the broader societal impact of my work. Given the fuss that UK academics have made regarding the instigation of this requirement across all UK RCs a couple of years ago – long enough, indeed, for two name changes already, from ‘Knowledge Exchange Plan’ to ‘Impact Plan’ to ‘Pathways to Impact’ – it was something of a surprise to read in Nature that the NSF new Impact scheme is the first of its kind. Now personally, I have no objection to being asked about the wider impact of my work, even though it’s actually quite hard to demonstrate any kind of economic benefit (which ultimately is what the RCs are after) deriving from the kind of biodiversity research I do. Actually, it’s a positive thing to think about the ways in which one’s idle musings may actually be of some use to someone else. And particularly in this recession, with the looming presence of an austerity budget here towards the end of this month, it’s simply not realistic to expect the tax payer to fund me to sit and think, regardless of how culturally sophisticated that would make us as a nation.

So broadly, I’m in favour of impact activities, especially as they actually offer the chance of more money, to fund some fun stuff – in my field, generally initiatives in web-based data-sharing, or stakeholder involvement, but also potentially seeding spin-out companies, partnerships with industry, and so on.

The issue I have is in the way that impact has crept into the assessment process of responsive mode (i.e. ‘blue skies’) funding proposals. For example, NERC initially stated quite categorically that – providing they reached a certain minimum standard – Impact Plans would have no bearing on the decision to fund research, which would be entirely based on the scientific excellence of the main proposal.

Of course, although that may have been the order from on high, it is not what happened in the panel meetings convened to make funding decisions. These panels have a really tough job assessing an increasing number of proposals with a limited pot of money. Clearly, any additional means that they can find to separate the funded from the also-rans will be used. And given that they (and all reviewers of the grant proposals) had full access to the impact plans, these quickly became an additional way of ranking proposals. Great science, crap impact? Sorry, we’ll give the money to the proposal with great science and great impact.

NERC now state:

Research grant proposals will continue to be assessed on science excellence. Pathways to impact will be included for assessment as part of the usual review process and will be considered as a secondary criterion alongside risk/reward and cost effectiveness.

At least this is out in the open now, and we know where we stand. The remaining problem lies with how these plans are assessed – in the standard review process, and by scientists who do not necessarily (in fact, almost certainly do not) have any expertise in matters of ‘impact’, leading to potential frustration if your proposal happens to land on the desk of someone with a different view of impact from yourself.

So here’s my proposition. No impact plan to be submitted with any responsive mode grant proposal. Then, should your proposal be selected for funding, a condition of receiving the money is that you submit a formal ‘pathways to impact’ application which must meet a certain standard. Because the field would be so much smaller at this stage, these plans could be reviewed by a smaller panel of experts in the field of knowledge exchange and impact. This would save regular reviewers time. It would also, I believe, drive up the standard of impact activities, because if you already know you’re getting funding, but that you could get some extra money for a top impact plan, the incentive is there to make a really good job of writing it.

Just an idea, but I’ve yet to come up with a downside.

Pitching Biodiversity

Saturday 22nd May was about as biodiversity-centred as it’s possible to get: the International Year of Biodiversity International Day of Biodiversity. I’m not sure it made as big an impact as it might have done on me (a self-confessed ‘biodiversity scientist’), although I would wholeheartedly endorse the statement of Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. In particular, he puts to rest the outdated idea that conserving biodiversity is somehow a ‘luxury’ available only to rich countries:

Overall, it is estimated that natural capital constitutes 26 per cent of the total wealth of low-income countries, which is why slowing the loss of biodiversity was incorporated as a new target under the Millennium Development Goals. Let there be no doubt: it will be absolutely impossible to achieve sustainable development if we do not protect and preserve our biological resource base.

Accepting the key role that biological resources must play in development and poverty alleviation brings home how important it is for those of us working in the field of biodiversity science to communicate appropriately our research findings. This means treading the fine line between boldly stating the massive problems that we face, whilst at the same time giving some hope that appropriate action might be effective. According to Tim Caro, professor of wildlife biology at the University of California, Davis, this is a line from which both academics and NGOs often stray. In a letter to Nature last week, he writes that:

Some leading conservation biologists deliver unnecessarily gloomy addresses, closing with no solutions or a few anecdotal success stories. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), by contrast, can be too optimistic in their fund-raising lectures and magazines: false starts and dead ends don’t figure, because donors prefer winners. Both groups are misjudging their audiences.

I think we can all identify with this, in terms of how we pitch a paper. For instance, recently I’ve been getting really interested in identifying gaps in our knowledge of marine biodiversity – essentially, cataloguing biodiversity’s ‘known unknowns’. One result of this is a paper due out very soon in PLoS ONE, in which we used OBIS, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, to perform a global analysis which graphically shows where our knowledge of the distribution of marine species comes from.

Not wishing to scoop myself, I won’t discuss the results in detail – just mentioning in passing that the deep pelagic ocean, by a distance the largest habitat on Earth, is virtually unexplored. What I wanted to discuss rather was the decision we had to make regarding how to pitch the paper. One option was to note the huge gaps in our knowledge – the millions of cubic kilometres from which no specimens have ever been recorded – and go for an ‘Oh no, look at how little we know!’ tone.

Alternatively, we could have highlighted the fact that OBIS has managed to compile, in only a few years, 27.5 million records (each record is a specific location at which a given species has been recorded), meaning that we now have at least some idea of the geographic distributions of some 113,000 marine species. What is more, all of this information is accessible to anyone who wishes to use it. So it would have been perfectly justifiable to have written an ’Isn’t it fantastic how much we know, even in this hostile and inaccessible environment!’ paper.

In fact, we leant towards the former message, whilst making sure not to denigrate the achievements of initiatives like OBIS, the Census of Marine Life, and the wider community of researchers and institutes who have bought into this huge experiment in data-sharing. But it does bring home how these kinds of decisions – which are largely independent of the more objective process of actually doing the science – really influence the content of the published scientific record.